Lecture 7: Building Intimacy Flashcards
self-concept
- What we know and believe about ourselves
- “Who am I?”
- Our attributes, abilities, values, and goals
- Descriptive and evaluative components
the looking glass self
Charles Horton Cooley: we develop our self-concept through interactions with others
3 steps of the looking glass self
- Imagine how we appear to others
- Interpret others’ reactions
- Develop & revise self-concept based on these perceptions & judgments
the active role of the individual
- Not simply passively internalizing interactions with others
- Individual plays an active part in selecting & interpreting perceived judgments & perceptions of others
- Also attempts to manage others’ perceptions through self-presentation strategies
symbolic interactionism
- Our sense of sense is a social construction, developed & maintained via inferences from experiences with others
- Sense of self is experienced in relation to some audience (real or imagined; specific or generalized)
- Imagining reactions of others may be a conscious or non-conscious process
private beliefs & imagined audiences study method
- A study in two ostensibly unrelated parts
- First part: visualization exercise: they were told to visualize either their last interaction with a close friend or an older family member
- Second part: read and rate passages
private beliefs & imagined audiences study findings
- Participants who had previously thought about friends reported the erotic passage being more enjoyable, pleasurable, and exciting than those who had thought about older relatives
- Private beliefs are tailored for public acceptance, although we may not be consciously aware of this
self-esteem
- Evaluative component of self-concept
- How good or bad we feel about ourselves
trait level self-esteem
- Enduring level of self-regard
- Fairly stable
state level self-esteem
- Dynamic, changing feelings about the self
- Vary from moment to moment
sociometer theory
Self-esteem as a gauge to assess the degree of acceptance by others
self-esteem and acceptance
Trait self-esteem strongly correlates with perceptions of acceptance
individual and group decision making study
- Exchange description of yourself with other group members, indicate which group members you want to work with
- Then they were told they had to work alone either 1) because of random assignment or 2) because other group members did not choose them (rejection condition)
- Rejected participants felt worse about themselves
Intrapersonal view of self-esteem
private self-valuation
example of the intrapersonal view of self-esteem
ratio of one’s success to one’s failures (James, 1890)
Interpersonal view of self-esteem
believing that one possesses ceratin attributes should only affect self-esteem to the extent that one considers these attributes to be judged positively or negatively by others
example of the interpersonal view of self-esteem
Cady trying to fit in with the plastics in Mean Girls
interpersonal self-esteem correlational study method
Participants filled out global measures of self-esteem 2) rated themselves in 5 domains and 3) indicated how important those domains were for social approval or disapproval
interpersonal self-esteem correlational study findings
- Interaction between self-evaluations and the perceived approval value of the domain
- How closely your performance in a given domain is tied to your self-esteem depends on how much you think people around you value that domain
interpersonal self-esteem causational study method
- Phase 1: what research ideas are you thinking about these days?
- Phase 2: 2-ms exposure from a professor that was either approving or disapproving
- Phase 3: how good is this idea? How important is it?
interpersonal self-esteem causational study findings
- When primed with the approving face, students felt really good about their reserach
- When primed with the disapproving face, they felt much worse
